Technological advances and market forces have rendered wireless communication nearly ubiquitous in modern societies. Aggressive competition for market share among wireless service providers has commoditized wireless services. Service and product branding, as well as degree of customer satisfaction have become a differentiator that drives consumers towards specific service providers. Therefore, quality of service not only can drive product differentiation but it can dramatically reduce customer attrition.
To ensure an elevated level of quality of service, providers typically enable roaming of wireless devices among base stations. While the object of roaming is to retain a communication (e.g., voice, video, on-line gaming, music, etc.) when moving throughout areas of coverage, roaming implementations can actually be detrimental to the communication. In particular, excessive or frequent scanning of communication channels can render the roaming device temporarily inaccessible to an application running thereon and it can additionally cause poor battery performance, with the ensuing detrimental effects in quality of service and general user experience. In particular, voice applications or video streaming applications are prime examples of applications that are negatively impacted by interrupted access to the radio transceiver in a device.
It should be appreciated, nonetheless, that roaming in itself is not intrinsically detrimental. Instead, the source of deteriorated quality of service in roaming devices can be associated with poorly planned, indiscriminate scans on each communication channel available to the wireless device. Therefore, there is a need in the art for an efficient channel scanning mechanism that facilitates retaining a communication through roaming while preserving an elevated quality of service.